HEAVEN GEMINI PROJECT
Dear
colleagues,
This week, I
bring you one of the topics that it is awakening a bigger media attention. I am
talking about the project Heaven+Gemini that it is being developed by the
italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero.
The Heaven
project has as an objective a HEad Anastomosis VENture and a subsequent spinal
cord transplant (Gemini). This project was first published in 2013 by Dr.
Canavero and his team, and they have been working on it since then.
The project's applicability includes neurodegenerative diseases such as Werdnig–Hoffmann
disease (type I spinal muscular atrophy). So the first subject who will undergo
this procedure will be a patient under this condition. The intervention will
require to deal with several challenges like the spinal cord cut and its
posterior anastomosis, as well as the vascular front.
Previously,
it has been tested with a monkey with satisfactory results. The monkey was
sacrificed 20 hours after the operation due to moral issues tho.
If successful,
this project will definitely become “one small step for a man, one big leap for
mankind”.
That being
said, the fact of transplanting the whole body of a man (donor) into a head
(recipient) opens a big moral debate, specially from a religious standpoint.
These kind of transplants at some point could offer quite more than a solution
to degenerative diseases...
So those are
the questions and the ideas that I would like you to consider:
First off,
what’s your opinion on the procedure both at a professional and at a personal
level?
Is it
viable? Will it be successful? Do you think that science can make brain transplants a possibility eventually? What kind of moral
controversies do you find in this whole topic?
Share what
comes to your mind regarding that project and the chances that it may
bring.
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